The Clocks Are Ticking for Iraqis

Three years ago, it seemed as if the American withdrawal from Iraq might resemble the chaotic scenes that accompanied the fall of Saigon. That’s one reason why I spent months looking into the possible fate of Iraqis working for the U.S. there—because there wasn’t any plan for them in the event of an American evacuation.

By the end of August, all U.S. combat brigades will be out of Iraq. The good news is that there won’t be any frantic helo-lifts from a Green Zone landing pad. Tens of thousands of troops will make an orderly exit, along with untold thousands of vehicles and tons of other equipment. The Pentagon, with its supreme organizational skills, will be able to track every coffee pot as it makes its way out of Iraq and across the ocean back to these shores. And yet—here’s the bad news—for all the lead time and careful preparation, no one has made any plans for what to do with the Iraqis who work for the U.S. once the majority of American troops have gone home.

According to Kirk Johnson, the young former government official who founded the List Project, at least ten or twenty thousand Iraqis are still employed by the U.S. government or American contractors. There are six thousand interpreters on the payroll of a company called GLS, and the majority of them live on American bases because commuting to work is too dangerous for them. The U.S. is shutting down three hundred bases across Iraq, most of them small combat outposts. Once they’re closed, the Iraqis who lived and worked on them will have nowhere to go.

Over the past couple of years, Congress and the State Department have accelerated the process of giving America’s Iraqi allies visas to the U.S. But the process remains slow—it can take at least a year—and only a small fraction of eligible Iraqis have actually resettled here. Evidence suggests that Iraqi Christians get to the front of the line, along with family members of refugees who are already here. Once the troops are gone, there is going to be a spike—perhaps a sharp one—in applicants. A lot of these Iraqis will be in danger, and some of them will probably be targeted, during the long period of waiting for their applications to be reviewed. Iraqis who work with Americans are at the top of the death list of jihadi groups, whose umbrella organization, the Islamic State of Iraq, recently declared its intent to settle scores as the Americans leave. As Johnson says, “Two clocks are running: the clock on the application for resettlement, and the clock on withdrawal.”

The Obama Administration needs to come up with a fast-track plan for resettling the Iraqis who sacrificed the most for the U.S. and will be in greatest danger once we’re gone. The visa-application process will be inadequate to the need and the threat that will accompany American withdrawal. The U.S. government has no idea of the identities and whereabouts of all the Iraqis who work for Americans there, or of which ones feel so insecure that they will want to be resettled here. The List Project has just issued a report that calls attention to this brewing crisis. The report looks at previous cases of occupation armies leaving behind local allies in the wake of their exit (including the British in Basra a couple of years ago), and it’s not an encouraging picture. The Project’s recommendation is for some version of the Guam option, based on the 1996 U.S. evacuation of six thousand endangered Iraqis from Kurdistan to Guam, where they were processed for refugee status before being resettled in America. (Eric Schwartz, who now runs the refugee bureau at the State Department, was on Clinton’s National Security Council staff in 1996 and was the point man for the Guam airlift—so the institutional knowledge is readily available.)

With the List Project report drawing attention in Washington, there’s a possibility of congressional hearings over the summer. They can’t come too soon. “Countries tend to lose interest in their wars in the final years—it happens all the time,” Johnson told me earlier this week. “You stop paying attention to the details, and what happens is you abandon the ones who helped you. I’d like to think we’re not going to do that this time.”

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